The Convergence
Location: Mechanus
Character: Think as one of us, and you’ll be one of us. The strong prevail, and there is strength in numbers. Numbers always prevail. Join your mind with us, act with us, be us. We are all one together, just as we are many. Collected wisdom and knowledge are shared with all. We are not drones, but we are not individuals either. A hybrid of one mind and many, we benefit in all ways.
The Chant: The Convergence is a small and fiercely independent burg deep in Mechanus. Allegedly set up by mind flayers, this community of humanoids has some disturbingly similar habits to that rather unsociable race. This falls short of devouring brains, however, visitors will be happy to note.
The burg is unusual looking by Mechanical standards—the buildings are self-contained hexagonal pod structures connected by pipes and passageways. They are covered with the kinds of cogs and gears that you’d expect in the plane, and rotate slowly as the gears they are connected with spin. At the centre of the Convergence is a larger structure which acts as the central hub. The Town Hall, the locals call it, although it’s anything but a hall.
The locals are really rather similar. While each individual has distinct physical traits, strengths and weaknesses, and their own voice and accent, it would appear to the casual observer to stop there. In fact, all the locals of the Convergence seem to share common thoughts; it’s as if each and every one of them was mindlinked to all the others, permanently via some kind of psychic power. Most likely, they are.
Actually, locals do have their own personalities, not that a cutter’d know. But since they’re also hearing the thoughts of dozens of other cutters simultaneously, they all tend to be slightly detached and vague.
The Convergence is a burg with no secrets. Anything told to any member is instantly known by all the others, provided the local is in a one mile radius of the town’s centre. This seems to be the limit of the mindlink power. For largely that reason, Convergers are rarely found much further away from the burg—for cutters so used to the babble of thousands of voices in their heads, it’s a lonely life without it.
Ruler: There’s another surprising thing about the Convergence. One might expect all cutters in the burg to have an equal say in the running of the place, but in reality none of them do. See, the town hall has a rather deep cellar, and it’s in here that the locals put the brains of their dead. In a rather horrific ritual (to outsiders, anyway), the corpses of folk who’ve lived and died in the burg, and even those of petitioners who’ve volunteered for the procedure, are divested of brains and buried. The brains are added to the pool and their thoughts and memories once again shared with the inhabitants of the burg.
Behind the Throne: Nobody really knows how many ancestors are down there, but the Convergence has been in existence for several hundred years, so it must be a lot. The town-mind is the real ruler of the burg, and is now so powerful and wise that most powers would be afraid to tackle it. Fortunately, the inhabitants of the Convergence do not see overly keen on expanding their little burg. In fact, it’s not very obvious what they really are doing.
Psychic planewalkers report that there’s a loud mental drone emanating from the sector surrounding the Convergence, in a manner not dissimilar to that around Ilsensine’s Caverns of Thought. Rumours as to what the hivemind is doing abound, from the simple “testing the limits of psychic powers” to the rather wilder “setting up shop for a new illithid power in Mechanus”. Whatever the case, the fact is the people of the Convergence seem remarkably content and almost average, if it were not for the mind-pool they so happily live on top of.
Source: Jon Winter-Holt
